Project VIGLIO Update

Project VIGILANT or as I call it “VIGLIO” as their crudely drawn and misspelled logo would have it, has come under much scrutiny since the Defcon press conference. I have looked up quite a bit on the group and Chet Uber. What I have found can be summarized as “A little bad graphic design, and a lot of nothing” The site of the company that is said to be the core of Vigilant is BBHC LLC a company that alleges to perform data analysis but seems to have a side business in Amway according to its CEO.

In short, on the face of it its quite bogus and a publicity stunt.

However a posting from the redit site ostensibly has a “member” answering questions about the project. What the guy has to say is enlightening and potentially frightening if the poster has any credence at all;

Recently it has been revealed that this secret organization is monitoring ISP traffic from several major providers and also had a hand in advising Adrian Lamo to report the big Wikileaks leaker. Some details on Salon. It is probably also a fraud.

I was ‘recruited’ by the Executive Director over a year ago. Although they have good intentions I seriously doubt the capabilities of this group. My ‘vetting’ process was a joke. Anyway, since there seems to be some good interest in this group thought I would do an AMA. AMAA!

The poster goes on to say that he did indeed get recruited, and that he felt that it was a kind of “Beautiful Mind” situation in that the director dreamed this up and there was in fact nothing there. So, if that is the case why hasn’t the government come out and refuted it all? Has anyone gone on record here? I mean, certainly there is an element of “plausible deny-ability” here that they would enjoy in a couple ways huh? If they are indeed working with this so called group (Uber et al) then they certainly would not want to step up and say that they are working with them after this fiasco huh? The flip side of this is that perhaps they may say nothing even if they had nothing to do with these folks because the disinformation that it puts out there might be to their advantage somehow?

Who knows…

What’s is worrisome though is “if” the government did have some real connections to this group and their aegis. I said it in the last post and I will say it again here, this is a legal nightmare for civil rights and other laws on the books. All of this also may be more permissible today post the Patriot Act and its amendments that allow for these kinds of activities sans warrants.

What’s even more scary is that this is a LIGATT wet dream. He wanted to get into military and government contracts… Now these clowns potentially have?